Blog

Map Layers in Tableau – step by step (or layer by layer)

2020-12-30 by Johan de Groot

The Tableau 2020.4 release comes fully-loaded with tons of great features, including several key updates to boost your geospatial analysis. In particular, the new multiple marks layers feature lets you add an unlimited number of layers to the map. This means you can visualize multiple sets of location data in context of one another, and there’s no need for external tools to build custom background maps.

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Comments in Tableau

2020-11-16 by Johan de Groot

When you are creating a calculated field in Tableau Desktop, Server of Prep you might want to create some comments to help others see what the purpose of this field is, or explain the calculation that you made. In other situations you might want to test a line of code, and disable a previously written block of code without deleting it.

This is all possible using comments in calculated fields.

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502 errors on datasource downloads from Tableau

2020-11-08 by Johan de Groot

If you experience 502 errors when downloading large datasets from Tableau Server – either in a browser or Tableau Desktop – you might occur problems not related to Tableau Server, but a proxy or gateway in front of the server.

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Save a Tableau workbook if you can’t save it

2020-10-29 by Johan de Groot

A small tip for a situation that is occurring once in a while to me (probably Mac specific):

If you have been working on a Tableau dashboard for quite a while, you suddenly can’t save the workbook anymore. ‘Save’ results in a popup which disappears very quickly, and ‘Save as’ shows the ‘save as’ dialog for a few milliseconds before disappearing again. Odd behavior – but especially annoying because you really want to save the changes you have made in the last two hours…

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Year-to-date in Tableau

2020-10-11 by Johan de Groot

If you want to compare last year to this year ‘to date’, you have to take into account that a leap-year adds 1 extra date to the year – so you can’t just compare the day-of-year from this and last year.

Often this filter is used:

DATEPART('dayofyear',[Date]) &lt;= DATEPART('dayofyear',TODAY())

But this is a better one, since this compares day and month:

YEAR([Date]) &gt;= YEAR(TODAY())-1
AND (MONTH([Date]) &lt; MONTH(TODAY())
OR
(MONTH([Date]) == MONTH(TODAY())
AND DAY([Date]) &lt;= DAY(TODAY())))

If you want to have a ‘year to date’ until today (so today excluded), use this one:

YEAR([Date]) &gt;= YEAR(TODAY()-1)-1
AND (MONTH([Date]) &lt; MONTH(TODAY()-1)
OR
(MONTH([Date]) == MONTH(TODAY()-1)
AND DAY([Date]) &lt;= DAY(TODAY()-1)))